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Holy War: Type aliases

Kyle Cardoza writes: Erica, Is it considered bad style to typealias OpaquePointer when you have to deal with OpaquePointer values that point to different types? The typealiases make the code read so much nicer…

Using typealiases to create “pseudotypes” (where typealiases essentially duplicate a single type) neatly organizes your code. I endorse any solution that emphasizes semantics and supports readability. As OpaquePointer is not generic, it doesn’t encapsulate type information the way Array<Int> or Set<String> do:

You might consider an alternative. If you’re willing to trade off a little overhead against enhanced type safety, you might introduce a simple value type. Wrapping the opaque pointer enables you to use a type-specific initializer. Here’s an extremely rough example of what that might look like: